


Cryptozoology

by orphan_account



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Arthur Pendragon - Freeform, Cryptozoology, Gwaine - Freeform, M/M, Merlin Emrys - Freeform, St_Clare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-21
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 09:36:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/649170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin starts pushing his way through the crowd, trying to swallow his rising panic, and in his haste, crashes into a person built like a brick wall. His coffee explodes, soaking their shirt, but Merlin has already started moving away, all common courtesy forgotten in his haste, and then he hears a voice. From above him. And he slows to a stop. His heart seems to stop as well. Oh. He thinks. So I did die. </p>
<p>Written for ridicholasobrien's headcanon after Arthur's death</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cryptozoology

_It is dark, as it always is when he comes to this place. The grass is spongey and new under his bare feet. In the distance across the lake, the tower on the island is tall and watchful, pointing at the sky which is not so much speckled with stars as it is just one large star, with patches of blue black showing in-between. Cool water laps at his feet, and he lets himself be pulled in by invisible currents. The wind is calling his name, or perhaps it’s something else. There are weeds that grab at his ankles when he wades in deeper but they let go easily, are just breaths of air in the water. The mud is soft and warm, and he buries his feet into it as the calm water starts lapping at his shoulders. He kicks at bits of rock on the lake’s bottom blindly, sifting through them._

_It occours to him that he was looking for something, and the idle foot kicking suddenly becomes more of a search. He toes lazily through the mud, keeping his head above water, until suddenly he comes upon something warm and moving, buried deep in the mud, and a sense of urgency takes over. There is something precious and blisteringly delicate at the bottom of the lake. He can’t remember what it is but it is so, so important, and he begins to panic. He takes a deep breath in, and plunges under the water, swimming downwards in a desperate attempt to reach whatever it is that is stuck at the bottom of the lake, but the bed is a lot further down that he had realised, and seems to be getting further and further away with every bit he moves closer. Air escapes his lungs, and just as he is forced to start rising again, in the dirt and the weeds at the bottom of the lake, he sees a glint of polished metal, and then a tattered piece of blood red cloth, swaying gently in the current._  

Merlin wakes up with a jolt, disorientated. It takes him several seconds to realise it was a dream, and another few minutes of close-eyed, deep breathing to convince himself he isn’t going to start crying or something equally inane. It’s got to be the billionth time he has had that dream, and each time he has woken up with a terrible sense of loss and a deep, wretched yearning. He starts writing a letter of complaint to his subconscious as he lies there, drifting back to sleep, telling it, begging it for one night’s peaceful sleep.

Or rather, _trying_ to drift off back to sleep, because he is suddenly very uncomfortable. The sheets feel hot, the air freezing, and he blinks his eyes open, wondering if he should just get up. The decision is made for him when the sheets start feeling _really_ hot, and he realises that he somehow managed to set them on fire in his sleep. He leaps out of bed, cursing profusely, eyes watering not, this time, from being pulled out of a confusing dream but because the smoke is clouding his eyes. He extinguishes the flames with a thought, and then stands there on the carpet, staring at the burnt sheets and the charred bed-frame. He wipes his eyes, trying to decide whether to laugh or to groan. He settles on a hideous bastardization of the two when the bed gives an almighty creak and then splits in two with a puff of smoke and embers. 

A wry voice drifts over from the doorway. “Y’know, Merlin, you should set your bed on fire more often. You’d never be late to work again.” 

Merlin turns his head towards the door, smiling sleepily at the cat sitting in the doorway. He rubs his eyes and stretches in a yawn, wincing as his back cracks audibly. 

“Morning, Gwain.” 

“Morning, bed-head.” The cat pads across the room, head-butting Merlin’s leg briefly in greeting, and hopping up onto the window sill, where he starts preening his fur imperiously.  He isn’t entirely sure why or how the cat turned into Gwain. He had been walking home at night a few years ago, when the squeal of tires against wet road had caught his attention. He had looked towards the road, and seen a tabby cat, eyes huge and luminous in the dark, moments away from being made very flat indeed. The cat had miraculously survived with only a small wound (the car had somehow been transported to the outer Hebredies) and had followed Merlin home. 

There was something about the way he preened his glossy fur - which had turned out to be brown in the way of melted chocolate once Merlin had brushed the dirt and blood out of it - and the way that he narrowed his eyes whenever Merlin told a joke, as if to say “You’re not as funny as you think you are.” that had reminded him sometimes funnily, mostly just painfully, of Gwain. The name stuck, and inexplicably, the voice had followed.

Merlin gets changed, laughing at the wolf whistles that come from the windowsill. 

“How the hell do you whistle? You don’t even have any lips.” He says, pulling on a decent shirt and dropping the ever-so-slightly charred one he had been sleeping in onto the floor.  

“Merlin. I am a talking cat and you are a wizard.” 

“Point taken.” 

He makes his way down the hall and into the kitchen, ignoring the call of “You forgot to fix the bed, clot-pole!” and remembering the last time a bed split in two. He snickers, because that had been in a very different context indeed. He flops down onto the sofa with a bowl of cereal a minute later, and flicks on the television. 

_“As the conflict escalates, with estimations of nearly six thousand dead, the UN ca-”_

He switches the channel, cursing internally as the warm, fuzzy feelings of sleep disintegrate, and tries to swallow the now familiar swell of guilt.  Guilt that he should be helping, guilt that he knows he can’t. Not anymore. Wars stopped being fought with swords and men on horseback a long time ago. They’re fought with bombs and guns and computers now. He learned a long time ago that you can’t stop a war by making this world leader move to Tibet or by making this shipment of bombs sink to the bottom of the ocean. The problems run deeper nowadays, deeper than he could ever see, so he avoids them, flips over to watching Top Gear instead, although he can’t quite completely swallow the guilt. Never can. 

Some days he manages to forget. The weight of time has been so heavy upon him for so long that some days, he forgets that he is waiting for anything. These days are usually the ones he ends up very, very drunk at the end of, because when the illusion breaks, and the bits of emotional shrapnel inside of him shift, the sleeping leviathan of his deepest fear will flip over in his belly. Whenever this happens, he feels himself nudging just the very tip of something so dark and hopeless he has to close his eyes. The fear that he may be waiting for something that will never come about.

He swallows deeply, cereal suddenly dry and tasteless in his throat. Some days, he can forget. 

Today is obviously not going to be one of those days. 

His fingers brush absently against his wrist, and he looks down at the markings there. The numbers are still shifting, even after all this time. A line of zeroes now, and then at the end, 4:12:11...4:12:10... 4:12:09. He thinks back to a time, a number of years ago now, when he had an identical one on the other wrist. He remembers with a downwards twitch of the lips that when this happened, he sat at the edge of the lake for days, waiting to see bubbles, a red cloak, a familiar face, rising out of the water and calling his name, _Merlin, Merlin, I’ve come back, Merlin._  

Hoping, and praying.

For nothing. 

He had gone home, bitterly disappointed. So deep was his grief that when he woke from the long and nightmare-plagued state of inertia that he had fallen into, he had found the entire country plunged into black and white, all colour leeched away. People had been in hysterics, mass colour-blindness in the UK was being reported all over the world. It had taken him a long time to fix.

When he had looked at the clock on his wrist, he had noted with a mixture of anger and sadness that it had faded away, but the other was still ticking. He gave up on it, and has paid it little to no attention since. He isn’t sure what he might do if he went to that blasted lake again to find nothing, nothing at all but a lot of painful memories, and the turning of that ancient leviathan within him.  

*    *    *

Unlike the decision to reincarnate Gwain into a cat, his decision to settle down and move with the times had been a conscious one. The world became too complex, and far, far too small for nomads a long time ago - and too interesting, if he has to be honest - and eventually, he fell out of the habit of tying his shoes and leaving places as soon as he could.  

He actually gets to like modern life a lot more than he ever thought he could. Everything moves so _fast_ nowadays - or perhaps that’s just him. Time does tend become kind of obsolete when you have an infinite amount of it. He quite enjoys the pace of it, and he does definitely enjoy the technology. While it was sad and more than a little bit terrifying to see everything that he had grown up knowing plowed down in the name of progress, he does find home in this place. Home, he realised, is not a place but a state of being, and he had long since relocated his home’s roots to being, simply, _people_. No matter how few of them had wood-fires anymore, or how many places he had known crumbled, or indeed how he and Arthur had been rendered mythical, he can still find home in the little things that people do, things that never seem to change. Showing kindness, for example. Laughing at inappropriate things. Overusing jokes, ignoring advice, talking to strangers, being stupid and being brilliant. 

No matter how much the world might change, people will always be the same. Sometimes, that thought alone is enough to get him out of bed and face the day.

“You’re not going to do anything about that then, are you?” Says Gwain, who has sauntered in from the bedroom and jumped up onto the sofa. He looks pointedly at Merlin’s wrist with moon-like, yellow eyes. Merlin shakes his head, and pets Gwain fondly.  

“Not going through that lark again. It was probably Kilgharrah’s idea of a joke. A final riddle before he flapped away into the sunset.”

“Bastard.”  

“Bastard, indeed.” Merlin says, pensive. He shakes it off, and gets up, throwing on his jacket, which was draped over the back of the sofa. 

“I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you after work.” 

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What? Oh, yeah.” Merlin opens the window in the kitchen with a glance. He lives high up enough in his block of apartments, and has enough discreet protective spells set up to not worry about burglars. Gwain hops up onto the windowsill, tail flicking. He looks back at Merlin with something close to a smirk.

“You forgot to brush your hair again.”  

“Bugger off. Go gut some pigeons.”

“That I will. See you.” With that, he is gone, out of the window in a flash of sleek brown fur. Merlin downs a glass of juice, and then makes his way out of the flat, muttering something soft under his breath to seal the invisible enchantments cloaking the door.  

*    *    *

So he does manage to assuage the guilt of wasting his magic slightly by becoming a doctor. He breezed through University and the course. University, he had enjoyed especially. He had forgotten, in the years of isolation, the therapeutic quality of friends. It was kind of sad to see all the things that Gaius taught to him forgotten entirely, but then again, things like the X-ray and surgery both amaze and humble him. His brand of magic isn’t the only miracle nowadays. He found a job in St.Barts, and has gained somewhat a legendary status for healing since then, along with a lot of silly nicknames. 

“Hey, Great Magician?” Says Nurse Peters, some time just before lunch. Her soft voice interrupts Merlin’s note taking in the glaring white hallway. He looks up, and smiles. 

“Hi, Angie.” 

So he has, supposedly, moved on. Perhaps he has left behind all the people who went where he couldn’t follow a long time ago. Perhaps the reason he took Angie on when she first came to the hospital, fresh out of med school, was just kindness. Perhaps it wasn’t because the copper colour of her skin, and the long, brown hair that she keeps tied up in a pony tail reminded him so strongly of Gwen that he often finds himself on the brink of calling her that. Perhaps. 

But he doubts it.

“Can you come help me with Mr.Lopez?” She pleads. “His phosphate levels keep getting too high, but none of the combatants are working.”

“I’ll be there in five.” 

“Awesome. Thanks, oh Great One!” Angie scampers off. He looks after her, purple scrubs the only source of colour in the white setting of the hospital, and he smiles to himself. Life is decidedly better when it’s spent amoung friends.  

*    *    *

 

He usually goes out to lunch with some of the interns or with Angie, but they all seem to be busy, so today, he makes his own way out of the hospital. It’s the beginning of March, and greenery has just started returning to the city. Soft new leaves are sprouting from the trees, and the park looks that much greener as he walks through it to get to the cafe where he gets lunch every day. The people there are nice and they sell carrot and coriander soup, which he gets every day. He sits down by the window to eat, and furtively adds a sprig of rosemary to the bowl, as his mother used to do. It tastes so much better with it. Tastes like home. 

He looks out of the window as he eats, watches the world go by. Most people are listening to music, or tapping away on their phones - now, if there is one modern convenience he doesn’t understand, it has to be Social Networking. The telephone had been baffling enough; at Internet seems so unnecessary. Why do they bother emailing and FaceBooking each other, he wonders as he waits in a queue to get coffee after lunch, when they can just go and actually talk to them? He dismisses it as just one of those things that people do, which he has to do a lot, nowadays. 

He walks back down the now-busy street, clutching his coffee, enjoying the heat of it in the  biting wind. The people around him jostle for space, and he apologises constantly as he walks along, even if people are bumping into him. Force of habit. He lifts his cup up to his mouth in a brief respite from the constant movement, and as he does so, the sleeve of his coat falls down to reveal his wrist, and he notes that the numbers on his wrist are nearly at zero.  

He suppresses the suddenly clench in his gut, and swallows his coffee, but can’t quite manage to tear his eyes away from the numbers. Just as they are about to tick over past zero, he realises that he has made a terrible mistake. He needs to get to the lake. Maybe nothing will happen. But, just suppose that _something_ does happen, and after all this time, Merlin isn’t there to greet him. He starts pushing his way through the crowd, trying to swallow his rising panic, and in his haste, crashes into a person built like a brick wall. His coffee explodes, soaking their shirt, but Merlin has already started moving away, all common courtesy forgotten in his haste, and then he hears a voice. From above him. And he slows to a stop. His heart seems to stop as well. _Oh._ He thinks. _So I did die._

“Watch it, you moron!” The voice says. Merlin’s tongue is suddenly a dead weight in his mouth. He looks up, and knows in that second, with full certainty, that he is not dead. Because no heaven, no nirvana, no paradise could ever be as sweet as Arthur Pendragon, the Once and Future King, looking down at him with an all too familiar look of annoyance and disbelief.  

“Arthur?” Merlin’s voice is thick like molasses. He has envisioned this so many times over the millennia, and now it’s here, _he’s_ here, magic is flowing from him like it never has before and all over the world, plants come into bloom. Every bush, shrub and tree, no matter how out of season or indeed, how dead, is suddenly teeming with coloured flowers. Arthur narrows his eyes, and takes a step back in his expensive Italian shoes, and Merlin can’t help but laugh, because it’s _Arthur._ Here. It dawns on Merlin that this is what the first clock signaled. Arthur’s rebirth. And the second, their meeting again. And it hardly matters to him, that Arthur doesn’t know him. Because he is here. And he is safe. And wearing modern clothing, which is hilarious, and looking at Merlin like he’s something unpleasant stuck to the bottom of his shoe, like he did when they first met, all those years ago.

“How do you know my name?” Arthur says, suspicious, and Gods above, his voice is just as it used to be, crisp and well educated and no small measure arrogant. Merlin finds his knee jerk reaction to Arthur’s prattishness is still in-tact, and it’s as if not a day has passed when he says;

“It’s written on your forehead. Next to ‘twit’ and ‘cabbage-brains’.”

Arthur narrows his eyes dangerously, managing to look threatening even if his arms are held out an awkward angle because of his dripping shirt. “What did you say?”

“I said that it’s written on your forehead, along with ‘twit’ and ‘cabbage-brains.’ The years haven’t affected your sharp whits at all, have they?” He has to bite his tongue to stop himself adding _Sire_.  

Instead of shooting back an equally biting comment, Arthur pauses. He opens his mouth to talk, but then shuts it again a moment later.

“Have we met?” He blurts out.  

“I don’t know, you tell me.” 

Something flickers in Arthur’s expression, a moment of doubt. Then Merlin smirks, too happy to contain it, and the uncertain expression on Arthur’s face vanishes, the moment snapping shut like a guillotine. 

“Right.” Arthur suddenly grabs Merlin by the back of the neck and starts steering him away, through the crowd. People see them and give them a wide berth, staring in curiosity or amusement. Arthur seems impervious to it all, still holding some kind of regal power, even though he can have no memory of being that person anymore. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Merlin squawks, indignant. “Show some respect for your elders!”

“I’m taking _you_ to buy me a new shirt. And I am almost definitely older than you.”  

“You’re really, really not. Also, I have to get back to work!” 

“You should have thought about that before you became a blithering dolt with no sense of spacial awareness.”

And Merlin laughs, then, even though he is being dragged through a crowd, and Arthur’s shirt is dripping cold coffee onto him. He laughs, because the leviathan slithers back into the depths of nothingness from whence it came. He laughs, and all over the world, trees start bearing sweet fruits.

 

**Author's Note:**

> More chapters to come maybe hohoho you don't know, I don't know, it's chaos
> 
> The original post: http://ridicholasobrien.tumblr.com/post/39084098064/headcanon-by-nick-after-arthurs-death-merlin


End file.
